The Great Dabbawalla

My time in Mumbai was brief but full. The city itself seems to be about as different as could be from, Delhi. Clean, full of sky scrapers, bustling, and largely friendly. Through a contact of a contact I was able to spend some time learning about one of the stranger aspects of Mumbai life – the dabbawalla.

The term “dabbawalla” means something close to “boxman.” The dabbawalla are an entire caste of people whose job is to transport home cooked lunches to their locations at peoples’ places of work. There are 5000, largely illiterate, dabbawallas who use a complex system of symbols and home-grown business sense to move 200,000 lunches each day. The system is near flawless (one research paper put it as one screw up in 16 million successful deliveries) and has been going for over a century. Almost all of these men hail from a small village a couple of hours outside of Mumbai and because of the small town nature of things, almost all are somehow related. The unique shape of the city and cheap train network make it affordable for this system to work here and only here. And while it’s amazing to watch these men scurry about doing their job, what I was interested in is how this amazingly Indian concept has held on as long as it has. While fast food is booming as the only option for office workers in virtually every megacity in the world, in Mumbai it is the norm to have a fresh home cooked meal every day.

The system works a bit like this (and while I use gendered terms here the system is becoming less so, again in an interesting way). Man leaves in the morning to go to work at six to accommodate for the two hour commuter train to work. He wants lunch, so his wife would have to get up at four to cook it and send it with him. Instead, in rushes the dabbawalla, making it so that she can send off the lunch at eleven to get to the office at one, giving her an extra five hours of sleep. You subscribe to the service on a monthly basis – man on a bike comes by your house to pick up your tiffin (a stainless steel box or canister which everyone uses to eat out of), he hands it off to the next fellow at the train station, who hands it off to someone at the next train, to a sorter, to another bike, to the office. A couple of hours later the dabbawalla picks up the tiffin and the whole process happens again in reverse. The average tiffin goes through the hands of five or six people in each direction. It has no writing on it besides a few grease paint marks of x’s, o’s, and squares. Depending on how far away you live from the office, you can get deliveries for between 150 and 400 rupees a month (three to ten USD).

Now, while this used to be all men receiving and women cooking, it has expanded lots over the past couple of decades. Now about a quarter of the office workers receiving lunches are women. They deliver to schools. If you want to deliver to your husband, children, brothers, sisters, and cousins, you can send tiffins to all of them. If you have no one at home to cook for you the dabbawalla have found homemakers who will be willing to cook extra meals on a subscription basis so that strangers can also have a homecooked meal and the homecooks can get a little bit of extra cash.

I am not the first or last person to marvel at this system. The whole organization organized itself (stemming from a demand during the British rule for home cooked meals that were British for British workers, then moving to Indians wanting their own food too) and incorporated during the 1960s. The three heads of the organization are former runners themselves and now give talks at major business colleges around the world on a system of organization and efficiency which came naturally to them.

Moving away from the marvel that it does work, it’s amazing to think about why people want it to work. In a city which is renown for its hustle and bustle it’s amazing to think that something as little as a home cooked meal would get this much love and care – but it’s a sign of how people are making attempts to adapt to this way of life while maintaining connections to their roots. While the moustachioed man across from me on the train to Mumbai seemed rather judgemental about most of what I am doing, he was happy to hear I would be spending time talking with the head of the dabbawallas. When I asked Mr. Moustache why he got his lunch delivered this way he said the most important part to him was the continuation of the bond with his family. While he, his wife, and his children may not eat together, they are eating the same thing. His wife knows what he likes to eat and makes it for him. If he doesn’t finish his lunch, she’ll notice and intuit that he is ill or stressed. His meal is coming from someone he loves and trusts and he knows that they are quality ingredients going into his food. It’s an interesting solution to the onslaught of the fast paced life which is overtaking India. Again and again as I continue to talk to folks, the reason I hear that everyone is eating more wheat is because they need to have convenience foods. It will be interesting to see if the dabbawalla will survive and how their business and traditions evolve as the city and the workforce continues to grow.